By bringing people into small writing circles and giving them
the empathy-based tools to break silences together,
we join to create a literature that will dare our larger community
to care enough to take action, as we seek to find paths away
from the cycles of poverty, violence, addiction, abuse, and despair into which so many were born.
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- Erika Duncan, Herstory Founding Executive and Artistic Director
Herstory’s Unique Pedagogy
Our belief is that memoir writing at its most powerful can change hearts, minds, and policies,
ultimately helping to create a more just world.​
Herstory’s unique community writing approach encourages writers to use memoir to explore deeper, to embark on a journey of self-discovery that requires bravery, honesty, and perseverance. The path that leads from self-discovery to changing the mind or heart of a reader and to building a better world is the process of creating empathy in a "stranger-reader."
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Empathy is the cornerstone of Herstory pedagogy. While all writing is potentially a vehicle for connection, writing committed to creating empathy is what most allows a stranger-reader to feel our common humanity. The more we collectively use the tools of writing that allow a stranger-reader to walk in our shoes—whether this person is a judge, a politician, a teacher, or an estranged family member—the less alone we will be in finding new solutions.​​
Workshop Experience
Each new Herstory workshop begins with the facilitator (trained in Herstory’s pedagogy) inviting participants to finish this sentence in the way that is most authentically them:
“If my words had the power. . . .”
This then leads to the Page One Moment tool: “Where would you want a Stranger-Reader, someone who doesn’t know you, to meet you on page one? At what moment in your life would you begin your story, so that from the very first page a stranger could care enough to keep reading, to walk in your shoes as they read?”
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The facilitator then invites participants to imagine aloud a few different page one moments, encouraging them to create scenes from their memories, thus launching the process of determining how to create empathy in the stranger-reader while also establishing from the outset a way into the person’s story that can accommodate different narrative structures. Once workshop participants have found their page one moment and the “container” for their memoir, they have what they need to set out on their memoir writing journey. In the workshops that follow, participants share their writing with the group and the facilitator, whose feedback and guidance ensure that each writer continues to keep empathy and narrative structure in mind in order to produce high-quality memoir writing that can stir the heart of the stranger-reader.
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Herstory’s unique tools, techniques, and practices—many introduced in the first community workshops in 1996—undergo continuous honing based on input from workshop participants, fellows, facilitators, and facilitators-in-training. This produces a pedagogy whose pillars, while solid and tried and true, can also incorporate new ideas and terminology. Like Herstory itself, which works in myriad settings in the US and around the world, the pedagogy is fluid, adaptive, and participatory. ​
Whether deeply transforming how correction officers view the incarcerated people in their charge, how teachers interact with their students, how parents understand and respond to their children, or how domestic violence survivors understand themselves, Herstory’s signature approach to memoir writing has affected countless people’s lives by challenging and changing worldviews and behaviors. It has also led to profound transformation and healing for so many Herstory writers who, through connecting the dots of their personal history and viewing it as a trajectory rather than a random series of events, have learned to transform trauma into strength, silence into voice.
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To learn more about Herstory’s pedagogy, please see our training manuals, Paper Stranger and Passing Along the Dare to Care and our curriculum and resources websites: